Solidarity with the
Struggle of the Asturian Miners :In their Turn, They Show us
the Path to Follow !

Since
the beginning of June, thousands Spanish miners of the Asturias are
on struggle against the perspective of closure of the coal mines of
their region, the last ones of the country. Strikes, Days of Action,
Marches to Madrid, local demonstrations, and above all blockages of
the roads, the highways and the railway connecting Madrid to the port
of Gigón passing through the city of León. The
international bourgeois press of course has kept silent on this
struggle as well as the Spanish press made all it could to minimize
the reality and the importance of the violence of the confrontations
with the police and thus the political significance of this workers
fight. For more information, we refer our reader to the article of
the Internationalist Communist Tendency :
The
Struggle of the Asturian Miners1.

This
struggle of the miners is the expression of a new moment in the
present classes struggle arisen from the crisis. The very fact that
it develops in Spain, heart of the “democratic and citizens”
movements of the “Indignados” that we didn't stop
denouncing the trap and its use by the bourgeois forces, comes to
mark the difference between a movement which refuses to define itself
on a class ground and thus
rejects the political struggle between the classes and against the
bourgeois State
and
a genuine workers struggle which affirms itself and develops in
opposition to the political, union and State forces of capital. The
struggle of the Asturian miners comes to mark the end of the
“Indignados” and others “Occupy Wall Street”
that the bourgeoisie won't be able to use as massively as it could do
it the last two years. The struggle of the Asturian miners comes to
manifest that only the workers struggle can bring a true perspective,
a real path, for the fight against capitalism.

The
miners of Asturias resume the way that the proletariat in Greece
showed us. The resistance and the fight against the dramatical
economical measures that the bourgeoisie strikes in all countries,
can't limit itself to pacific occupations of city places and to
hollow speeches about a “greater and better democracy” or
even to a “new society”... which would be “more
democratic”. It is from the places of production, in particular
by paralysing the latter through strike or occupation, that the
working class must fight against the attacks which fall the ones
after the others. It is from this places that it must dash into the
streets and must seek to spread and unify its fight.

Inevitably,
the bourgeoisie and its State are more and more forced, because the
crisis, to radically oppose the development of these workers retorts.
Less and less, they'll be able to let the working class develop its
struggle without opposition. For this, the political forces of the
Left, leftists and unionists, are in front line in order to attempt
to take control of these struggles and to lead them into a harmless
ground for the State. Here at once, there is a political fight for
the immediate direction of the struggle that the more militant and
more conscious workers as well as the communists have the particular
responsibility to assume with determination. But today, the scale of
the attacks against the working class and the anger and the rage that
they provoke, push the workers to oppose directly to the State by
trying to block its functioning. It is the significance of the
demonstrations in Athens which aimed at preventing the Deputies to
enter to Parliament to vote the austerity and misery plans. It is
still the significance of the blockages of the roads and highways,
the occupation of the coal mines and of the small towns of miners of
the region. In both cases, Athens and Asturias, the workers didn't
hesitate to defend themselves against the police repression which
looked at maintaining the functioning of the State apparatus. The
miners didn't hesitate to organize and to arm themselves in order to
take responsibility for this class violence against the State
repression.

For
all these reasons, in their turn, the Asturian miners show us the
path to follow. They show us the level up to which we must today rise
the workers' retort.

Only
the working class is capable to lead the struggle up to block a
region. Only the working class is capable to oppose the State by
hampering the functioning in a first time - in the future for
destroying it. Only the working class is capable to outflank the
political manoeuvres that the bourgeois forces don't stop setting up.
Only the working class is capable to organize and even to “arm”
itself in order to oppose it own violence to the bourgeoisie's one.
Only the working class is capable to endow itself with political
class consciousness and with a political vanguard organization which
goes with it – both being indispensable weapons and tools for
the orientation and the direction of its class fights.

The
Asturian miners are today isolated. And nevertheless, they show us
the path to follow. For them, searching for active solidarity of the
other sectors of the working class in the country and elsewhere in
the world is an imperious need. Not leaving them isolated is a duty
for the other sectors. Joining them in the struggle and follow the
path they've opened is the condition for developing and globally
strengthening the workers fight, but also to break up their
isolation.

It
is true in the Asturias and in Spain. It is true in all Europe and
elsewhere.

Solidarity
with the Asturian miners !

Let's
go on the path they have taken following the example of the
proletariat in Greece !

Against
the attacks and generalized misery, against capitalism, against the
bourgeoisie and its State, let's oppose the unified front of the
workers struggles !

The
Fraction of the International Communist Left, June 28th
2012.

1.
It is particularly “surprising”
that the ICC has not mentioned yet this struggle, not even its
section in Spain up to now. Except its nucleus of new militants
in... Turkey. Since we don't understand Turkish, we are unable to
take knowledge of the political content of this statement. We are
curious to know it since, following the bourgeois propaganda of
these last years, the ICC has presented with great enthusiasm the
movements of the “indignados” and of the “Occupy
Wall Street” as the example to be followed in opposition to
the genuine workers struggles, the genuine class struggles, linked
to the production places; such a the proletarian resistance in
Greece. In the light of this opportunist enthusiasm, the present
silence of the ICC about the miners enlightens the reality of its
contempt for the genuine workers struggles and its fear of the real
classes struggle. [This note as well as this article has been
written in French before the English ICC newspaper World
Revolution published a short
and very vague statement on this event in its July issue].

Small Aspects of a Great Problem, Internationalisme, 1948

"In
order that consciousness and the knowledge that the proletariat must
have of itself and of the world it has to transform, develop, it must
have the ability of developing in its ranks a vanguard. The role of
the members of the proletariat's revolutionary party is to bring to
the knowledge of the proletariat the conditions of its revolutionary
destiny. The proletariat will reach the highest point of its
political maturity when the problems which are the subject of the
discussions of the vanguard and the party will be largely discussed
in its press and in its political meetings.

The
condition of the revolution is thus not only that this discussion
takes place but also it develops. Our task is to favour its opening
and its development.

(...)

We don't have to
impose a thought but to seek, in the working class and in common with
it, the means to make the revolution. We don't think we hold alone
the monopoly of the “revolutionary thought”, enclosed in
a tabernacle and that we show to the prostrated believers. All the
contrary, we think one manifestation of the working class is to give
birth to political groups. Our task is not other than to participate
to the life of these political groups, as expression of the class,
and to favour their birth and their development. It is only through
the development of the revolutionary action that the positions
acquired can verify themselves ; it is only through the life of
these groups that the positions are acquired, strengthened and
developed.

What is important
for the revolution, is not that the party have a sufficient number of
members but that the proletariat's consciousness be mature in order
to accomplish the task of leading the society. All the goal to reach
is there. It means making that the whole class, its more advanced
elements of the great industrial proletariat be able to accomplish
the most gigantic revolutionary task of History".

Extracts
of the article “Small Aspects of a Great Problem”
["Petits aspects d'un grand problème"]Internationalisme
n° 37, 1948, translated by us